Saints and Roughnecks was the title given to Chambliss' 1973 study in which he found that class and not crime often determines a person's reputation in the society and his fate with the police. The author, William Chambliss' selected two different groups of teenagers for his study, one coming from affluent part of the metropolitan area and are labeled Saints for the study, while the other group came from lower-income section of the society and were thus termed 'Roughnecks'. The study sought to find out just why the lower-income group was more often clashing with the police and ending up in jail for petty crimes, while the other group usually escaped police even though they were just about as delinquent as roughnecks. "In terms of the sheer number of illegal acts, the high-SES [socioeconomic status] boys were more delinquent. However, they were perceived as "sowing their wild oats" and were rarely disciplined, whereas the low-SES boys were seen as criminals and were frequently in trouble with school officials and with the police." (Gareis, 1993) Chambliss doesn't mention labeling theory but it is clear that labels are what determine a person's reputation. It was seen that since Saints came were from "good white upper-middle class families. They attended Hanniabal High: a moderate size high school in a suburb near a large metropolitan area. The Saints were active in school affairs, were enrolled in the pre-college program and received good grades," they mostly managed to escape punishment even though they were "some of the most delinquent boys at Hannibal High." (Chambliss p. 106) Police, teachers and society saw their troublemaking as a case of "sowing their wild oats." On the other hand, Roughnecks were often seen as 'troublemakers' who would end up in jail not because they were any more trouble than Saints but because they appeared rough and were "not-so-well-dressed, not-so-well-mannered, not-so-rich boys" and thus "were heading for trouble." People had a totally different perception of these boys and their oat-sowing wasn't seen in the same light as their Saint counterparts. "Townspeople would say, "You can see the gang members at the drugstore night after night, leaning against the storefront (sometimes drunk) or slouching around inside buying cokes, reading magazines, and probably stealing...
Wall blind. When they are outside and girls walk by, even respectable girls, these boys make suggestive remarks. Sometimes their remarks are downright lewd." (p. 107)
Saints and the Roughnecks - William J. Chambliss In his seminal essay "The Saints and the Roughnecks," William J. Chambliss studied how a community's differential perceptions led to preferential treatment of a group of juvenile delinquents from upper-middle class families over another gang of delinquents from lower-class families. The main determinant for a community's reaction to a juvenile's deviant behavior was socioeconomic class. Since this essay's publication in 1973, the idea that
Saints and the Roughnecks by William Chambliss is a masterpiece study in Seattle suburb in the 1970s and it demonstrates the significance of connecting the macro and micro factors together. (Conformity, deviance and Crime) The Saints and the Roughnecks were two clusters of boys from the same Hanibal High School, who got involved in the same kinds of abnormal behaviors but were branded differently by the public. (Violence; Disease
In his concluding questions, Chambliss notes these reactions, questioning how the meanings that were assigned to both groups by the townspeople, school officials, and police affected their futures. For this reason, Symbolic Interaction theory can be applied to the case of the Saints and the Roughnecks. In assigning values to both groups, members outside of these groups most likely impacted the groups' futures, according to Chambliss. The decisions of the
When speaking of visibility and demeanor, he refers to the fact that the Saints had access to vehicles to take them out of the eyes of their regular neighborhood, where as the boys did not have this privilege and therefore had to commit their delinquent acts directly under the eyes of the community. When discussing bias, he refers to the class structure and how the elite tend to view
Saints The Roughnecks and the Saints: A Research Overview The essential problem that the researcher set out to address in this article was the perception of and reaction to delinquency amongst teenagers in a specific town. more specifically, the researcher ended up identifying a difference in the way teenage boys of different socioeconomic backgrounds were viewed by teachers, the police, and other community members in light of their delinquency, though it
Reflection: Saints and RoughnecksIn his essay �The Saints and the Roughnecks� William Chambliss examines a curious phenomenon in high school: while delinquent behavior was common among boys of various social classes at Hannibal High School, only the negative behaviors of the lower-class, less academically inclined boys was viewed as delinquent. The clean-cut, high-achieving so-called Saints often cut class early, hung out at pool halls, and, objectively speaking, engaged in more
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